Hi,
I have put together a short script for compiling the entire tree (prompted by the latest gcc 4.5.3-r1 stabilization) at your leisure. It stops and prompts after compiling 10 packages and shows the list of next 10 packages which will be compiled. It exits if it encounters an error while compilation.

It is for people using gentoo on laptops like me. The aim is to give you a chance to pause the compilation mid way and resume when you can.
It may be redundant for most people as emerge --resume can very well take care of things. Although the script is not very refined or robust, I hope it will be helpful for some people.

I have not used equery list '*' because the above approach preserves the build order. Please note that this script does not automate the complete gcc upgrade process. It just helps in the "compile world" part. Please follow the gcc upgrade guide if you are upgrading to new gcc version.

Can you not run the compilation in screen and then Ctrl-z to pause the compilation? Later when you want to resume you could simply use fg. If you want to close down your terminal, you could detach screen by using Ctrl-a d and later reattach it by using screen -r._________________emerge --quiet redefined | E17 vids: I, II | Now using e17 | e18, e19, and kde4 sucks :-/

Your basic loop of emerging one package at a time in the list is what update started out doing, and still does unless you're using multiple jobs, although it was also designed to filter the output from single emerge's (which was only kind when we started.) It's a much larger script nowadays of course.

You can type update --stop while one is running, from another terminal (or same one if you've backgrounded the first update) to make it stop after the current package. (Running just update will ask you if you want the running one to stop after current package.) This means you can pause at any time you like while not losing any work.

Or you can just hit CTRL-C if you want it to bail out immediately (which will mean current package will have to be restarted.)

In either case, you can resume with update -r which historically has been more reliable than lower-level emerge --resume.